In the late 1960's many people in North America turned their attention to environmental problems, and new steel-and-glass skyscrapers were widely criticized. 41) __________.
Skyscrapers are also lavish comsumers, and wasters of electric power. In one recent year, the addition of 17 million square feet of skyscraper office space in New York City raised the peak daily demand for electricity by 120 000 kilowatts—enough to supply the entire city of Albany, New York, for a day.
42) __________. The heat loss(or gain) through a wall of half-inch plate glass is more than ten times that through a typical masonry wall filled with insulation board. To lessen the strain on heating and air-conditioning equipment, builders of skyscrapers have begun to use double glazed panels of glass, and reflective glasses coated with silver or gold mirror films that reduce glare as well as heat gain. However, mirror-walled skyscrapers raise the temperature of the surrounding air and affect neighboring buildings.
43) __________. If fully occupied, the two World Trade Center towers in New York City would alone generate 2.25 million gallons of raw sewage each year—as much as a city the size of Stanford, Connecticut, which has a population of more than 109000.
Skyscrapers also interfere with television reception, block bird flyways, and obstruct air traffic. 44) __________.
45) __________.
[A] Glass-walled skyscrapers can be especially wasteful.
[B] Tall buildings are an inevitable building form and part of the contemporary landscape.
[C] In Boston in the late 1960's, some people even feared that shadows from skyscrapers would kill the grass on Boston Common.
[D] Skyscrapers put a severe strain on a city's sanitation facilities, too.
[E] Still, people continue to build skyscrapers for all the reasons that they have always built them—personal ambition, civic pride, and the desire of owners to have the largest possible amount of rentable space.
[F] Some of these ideas may soon appear in the city as a more holistic approach is taken in balancing environmental and social factors with the economics of building development.
[G] Ecologists pointed out that a cluster of tall buildings in a city often overburdens public transportation and parking lot capacities.